frozen petunias
by kathleenfergie
Summary: River is dead, he tells her one snowy night. AU, oneshot.


_Alright, here's a rewrite of my original frozen petunias that I wrote on the bus one day. I just added a few things. Enjoy._

_All the lords of BBC own this. _

Amy looked across the TARDIS, into the wet eyes of the raggedy man she'd adored all her life, confused at why he looked so broken. He'd just popped into her garden randomly, didn't even bother to come outside; he knew she'd get curious and come to him. He apologized in a weak voice about crushing the petunias, to which she chuckled at. He didn't know that it was winter and all he crushed was the snow. It would most likely form a hard ice clump now.

Coming back to his expression, Amy asked what was wrong, and the Doctor responded with an obscure gesture of his arms. Then he collapsed against the console suddenly, muttering to himself and pushing random buttons with a fervor she'd never seen before. Kept asking where Rory was, to which she explained that he left for the weekly night shift he'd been working for several years. _Rory should be here_, he said, _I'll come back later_. Amy could tell he was delirious; he looked like a man who'd not slept for a year. Maybe that was true, she conceded.

Amy repeated herself once more, but this time she asked about River, why wasn't she traveling with him? It was seldom that Amy was visited by the Doctor these days without her daughter. At the mention of River, he stopped moving, as if frozen to the spot. _Doctor_, she repeated. He turned away babbling incessantly, and Amy thought she could hear his words catch in his throat, like he was crying. His voice was a few pitches higher than usual, he sounded almost hysterical.

All Amy could decipher from his choked speech was_ I couldn't get to her...it was too fast...time vortex...River._

She tried to walk towards him but stumbled over something on the console bay. She bent down, finding a discarded sonic. How very _unlike_ the Doctor, Amy thought, to leave his prized device on the ground. She advanced again, holding the sonic to his turned back. She came back to her earlier question, Where was her River?

_Amy, Amy, I'm so sorry_, he cried, coming towards her and falling at her feet. He latched onto her legs. _Pond_, he said, but she needed no explanation. He'd tried to catch her hand, that's why he had let go of the sonic. They were running from an evil alien species and the doors didn't close in time. River wasn't wearing her vortex manipulator, she'd become too accustomed to the TARDIS. He took off without checking and River was blown off her feet. In a desperate act, she tried to hold onto the blue doors, the old wood dented from her fierce grip. He had only been mere centimeters away before it all went wrong.

He was too late, the Doctor explained.

_I'm sorry my love_, she'd said to him, the time vortex swallowing her.

All the while, Amy Pond was wailing, shouting that it couldn't be true; River would have known how to save herself. Her daughter was invincible, she'd thought. Her sweet baby, Amy cried, the baby she only held once, before she was taken, the child raised to kill the Doctor, her best friend.

The Doctor was still hugging onto her legs, sobbing into them, apologizing over and over again. _Forgive me, Pond_, he pleaded,_ forgive me._

She suddenly couldn't speak, as if she had swallowed her throat, like he had felt only moments ago. The tears dripped down her cheeks, staining them and her shirt. Amy had barely anything left in the world, she realized. _Rory_, she realized. She had Rory, but she was barren. Her womb was dry and the only child to ever come from it was dead, her dust scattered in space.

_No, Doctor,_ she said. _No, no, no! _She wouldn't forgive him. It was over. She knew he couldn't have done anything more, but she felt defeated. Her raggedy man had let her down. _Let go of me_, she whispered at first, and then she was screaming it over and over again, like a broken record. But he didn't let go, not even when she fell to the floor, beating his back with her fists. He took each one of them; he let his body succumb to the hurt. He deserved it.

Finally, Amy ripped his arms from her legs, stood up, and tumbled down the steps and out the TARDIS door, her shirt catching on the splinters River's grip had loosened. Amy tripped and fell into the snow, wailing like a child, unable to stop the sorrow flowing from her chest. The cold did nothing to numb it, the hurt rushing through her cold, cold veins. Beneath the snow were the dead, frozen petunias that she had planted because they had been River's favourite. They would grow on, but her daughter, her only child, would not.

_Pond, please, you have to get up_, the Doctor whispered to her, kneeling beside her in the snow. _You can't stay outside, you'll freeze._

_I'd rather die than live knowing she's dead, _Amy responded achingly.

The Doctor, sobbing, picked her up, her protests falling on deaf ears. _River_, she kept saying. _River, River, River. _It slowly morphed into _Melody. _

_Melody._

The Doctor left Amy Pond broken on her couch, returning to his empty TARDIS. The box itself was cold and quiet, as if she herself were mourning, too.

He flew off, but this time he put the stabilizers on, as he would for the rest of his time in his blue box. For the rest of his life he continued to fly the TARDIS properly, his future companions never getting to experience the gleeful and bumpy rides of the TARDIS, to see him fake a mistake in flying.

He was precise.

Forever.

He did this because that's what River would have done.


End file.
